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Rookery   Listen
Rookery

noun
(pl. rookeries)
1.
A breeding ground for gregarious birds (such as rooks).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rookery" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the Phenix Building, the office of the American Express Company, and the monumental Field Building, by Richardson, with what Mr. Schuyler calls its grim utilitarianism of expression; and the same praise might, perhaps, be extended to the Auditorium, the Owings Building, the Rookery, and some others. In non-commercial architecture Chicago may point with some pride to its City Hall, its University, its libraries, the admirable Chicago Club (the old Art Institute), and the new Art Institute on the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... paced backwards and forwards with downcast eyes, turning slowly and indifferently as if it mattered little where he walked. The merry blackbirds in the hay field adjoining the garden called to each other continuously, and from a hidden rookery came the voice of the dusky settlers, which is, perhaps, the saddest sound in all nature's harmonies. But the Jesuit resolutely refused to listen. Once, however, he stopped and stood motionless for some seconds, with his head turned slightly to meet ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... Metropolitan Gypsies there is another place to which it will be necessary to devote a few words, though it is less entitled to the appelation of Gypsyry than rookery. It is situated in the East of London, a region far more interesting to the ethnologist and the philologist than the West, for there he will find people of all kinds of strange races,—the wildest Irish; Greeks, both Orthodox and Papistical; Jews, not only Ashkenazim ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow

... rickety edifice would last as long as he did, and he was not wrong, for one night it came down bodily about his ears and he perished amid the ruins together with thirty others, all who were in the aged rookery at the time. This catastrophe ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... cannot think what is gone of Mr. Mellish's rooks. I fancy they have taken flight somewhere; but I have missed them two or three years past." All this while, according to his fellow-traveller's report, the rookery was darkening the air above with undiminished population, and deafening all ears but his with their cawings. But nature has been gently withdrawing such phenomena from the notice of Thomas Westwood's senses, from the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... done before breakfast the morning after the fire; and at the tables the girls' tongues ran until Miss Brokaw declared the room sounded like a great rookery she had once disturbed near an old ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson

... or the low-hanging clouds and snowy branches of winter: the ground shady with spreading trees: a great tree flourishing on one side, backward some Scotch firs on a broken bank where the roots hung naked, and beyond, a rookery: on the other side a pool overhung with bushes, where the water-fowl fluttered and screamed: all around, a vast meadow which might be called a park, bordered by an old plantation and guarded by stone ledges which looked like little prisons. Outside ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... run on before they can run on them. And there, 250 miles north of the Aleutian Islands, we can make motor trucks pay for themselves in a single year by the force they add in effective transportation. We have a seal rookery 13 or 14 miles from the village of St. Paul Island. We have not been able to kill seals there, because we could not get skins down to the village. Now a couple of motor trucks bring them down without the least difficulty, and in order to get the road there ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government

... he called home. Nina was a peevish, querulous wife—always finding fault, and never satisfied with Beppo's earnings; true, it was little enough he brought at night after trudging all day with his hand-organ, and as he approached the little rookery at the end of the day his steps grew languid and heavy, for he knew his only welcome would be Nina's grumbling, fretful greeting; and poor Old Beppo, after unstrapping his burden and eating his poor meal of macaroni, found rest, not on the little seat outside his ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various

... comin' it a little strong, Walt," chuckled the captain. "I guess though we've stumbled onto a good big rookery for sure. That smell comes mostly from the dead baby birds, broken eggs, an' such like. But let's keep quiet, lads, we're nearly ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... by one Joe Banks in 1844, and was the resort of all classes. This was in Buckridge Street, over which New Oxford Street now runs. In the last sixty years the face of the parish has been greatly changed. The first demolition of a rookery of vice and squalor took place in 1840, when New Oxford Street was driven through Slumland. Dyott (once George) Street, Church Lane, Buckridge and Bainbridge, Charlotte and Plumtree, were among the most notorious streets thus wholly or ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... keep the trodden ways, Stroked down my tippet, set my brother's frill, Then with the benediction of her gaze Clung to us lessening, and pursued us still Across the homestead to the rookery elms, Whose tall old trunks had each a grassy mound, So rich for us, we counted them as realms With ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... have something in them, but not much. They will bear dilating upon with the utmost license of inventive prose. All things are not alike conductors to the imagination. A learned Scotch professor found fault with an ingenious friend and arch-critic for cultivating a rookery on his grounds: the professor declared "he would as soon think of encouraging a froggery." This was barbarous as it was senseless. Strange that a country that has produced the Scotch Novels and Gertrude of Wyoming should ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various

... gentleman, and tell him he'll find me and Mr. Pickwick in the rookery. Show the gentleman the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... King Edgar had slept under its uneven on some visit to Dunstan's monkish colony, was scarcely sufficient to make a palace of the rambling rookery which a wall separated from the West Minster. It was an irregular one-storied building,—or, rather, group of buildings connected by covered passages,—and every kind of material had been used in its construction,—brick and stone and ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... with all the land thereto appertaining, situate in —— Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several families, and known as 'the Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix, the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral or death's-head ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... through lovely wooded and rocky scenery until we reached a water-mill. We had seen several herons on our way, a rather scarce bird, and we were told there was a breeding-place for them at Sharpham, together with a very large rookery. We passed Cornworthy, where there was an old church and a prehistoric camp, and some ruins of a priory of Augustinian nuns which existed there in the fourteenth century; but we had no time to explore them, and hastened on to Dittisham, where we regained the bank of the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation—and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air—will darkness ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot

... way toward the top of the outer rock. Through rookery after rookery of birds, we climbed until we reached the edge of the summit. Scrambling over this edge, we found ourselves in the midst of a great colony of nesting murres—hundreds of them—covering this steep rocky part of ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... of birds from the rookery was flying in the same direction. Soon he discovered its goal—a marsh of considerable extent which was the feeding-ground. Numbers of the long-legged egrets were wading in the shallow water, stopping now and then to dart their long, sharp bills into the ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... cold, and one of those white frosts on the ground, which so much endanger the vintage at this season. We observed, however, no vineyards on the elevated ridge of country along which we were travelling, and which was perfectly English. A respectable old chateau, with a rookery, quick hedges, and extensive woods, thick enough for a fox covert, kept up the illusion agreeably. This style of ground continues beyond Saulieu; and between the latter place and Arnay le Duc, eighteen miles farther, its features ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... on the cultivated downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but here it appears the sentiment in his favour is just as strong in the farmer, or in a good many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know on Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer owns the land himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to scare ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... scientific visitors to a coral islet found almost innumerable sea birds and eggs. The multitude of birds and their prodigious fecundity inspired the thought that the "rookery" for the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean had been discovered. Investigations showed that the islet was also the abiding-place of a certain species of lizard which subsisted entirely on eggs. It was calculated that not one egg in several hundred was hatched out; yet in spite ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... cannot be compensated, a certain messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix, the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral or death's-head ring was ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... tall, fair, with a sorrowful kind of face, that has never been actually happy or pretty. Who could be happy in that musty old rookery! The father, I believe, did very little for their pleasure, but spent most of his time in ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... with more skill but less feeling and effect than he sang. Music and books had been the solace of lonely years, and he could easily see that he had pleased them with his songs. He went home to the dreary rookery out on Prairie Avenue and laughed at the howling wind. The bare grimy walls and the dim kerosene lamp, even Sam's unmelodious snore in the back room, sent no gloom to his soul. It had been a happy evening. It had cost ...
— The Deserter • Charles King

... noting nothing of this, Mr. McMaster led the way from one rookery to another, introducing his new workers to their wretched inhabitants with an easy grace that disarmed all suspicion, and made them feel that so long as he was the presiding genius of the school, they had nothing to ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... fellows, it's going to be a tough job for our firemen to save any part of the old building, because the blaze has got such a good start I reckon old Philip will have to put up a really modern house in place of the old rookery." ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton

... The Rookery of Emperor Penguins under the Cliffs of the Great Ice Barrier: looking east from Cape Crozier. xlii From a sketch by Dr. Edward ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... withdrawing the key the adventurer stood at alert attention; but the heavy silence of that sinister old rookery sang in his ears ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... now the buttery. A window, on which the whole family arms was emblazoned, had been removed to the residence of the actual proprietor of the manor. Another relic of the ancient manor of the Washingtons was a rookery in a venerable grove hard by. The rooks, those staunch adherents to old family abodes, still hovered and cawed about their hereditary nests. In the pavement of the parish church we were shown a stone slab, bearing effigies, on plates of brass, of Lawrence Washington, ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer

... I have no doubt that they will be pleased to make you an offer for your property. Here, I'll write their names on a card. To tell you the truth, we are to some extent interested with them. Now, don't show this sample to anyone else, but go straight to Clarm & Ging, Rookery building, Chicago. Anybody can tell you where it is. Here's the card. We'll telegraph them that you are coming, so you are somewhat in honor bound, you understand, not to go elsewhere—we have in some degree sealed the transaction with a part ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read

... know winter is coming? In the same way the vegetable world knows it is coming when it prepares for winter, or the insect world when it makes ready, but not as you and I know it. The woodchuck "holes up" in late September; the crows flock and select their rookery about the same time, and the small wood newts or salamanders soon begin to migrate to the marshes. They all know winter is coming, just as much as the tree knows, when in August it forms its new buds for the next year, or as the flower knows ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... contents. I was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind.' He found time for much besides reading. He delighted in riding, in shooting rooks in the Hall rookery, and in fishing for trout with clumsy tackle and worm. Passion for country sports was followed by passion for natural history in the ordinary shape of the boy's fancy for collecting insects and observing ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... discomfort and unpleasantry abroad, for a young relative of Spottleover the thrush had lost three or four eggs from his nest at the bottom of the garden. Of course they had been stolen, but who was the culprit? A chattering old sparrow said it was one of the rooks; and when the report got up in the rookery there was a fine commotion about it that evening, for the rooks held quite a parliament to vindicate the innocence of their order; and at last passed a vote of censure upon the sparrow for his false accusation; ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn

... this very building—the Rookery. Doubtless it was for this reason that the Rookery had popped into his head when he gave directions to the cab-driver on ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin

... that haughtiest of the haughty, John Knox, when Elizabeth first ascended the throne, crouching and repenting of having written his famous excommunication against all female sovereignty; or pulling down the monasteries, from the axiom that when the rookery was destroyed, the rooks would never return; when we find his recent apologist admiring, while he apologises for, some extraordinary proofs of Machiavelian politics, an impenetrable mystery seems ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... "A rookery!" I cried. "Now are we indeed saved. There must be men and cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters. Possibly ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... now and then one of the animals would rise in the shallows and crawl up on the beach, which evidently was a recognized place of resort for its kind. A small rocky island which protected us to some extent from the north-westerly wind carried a ringed-penguin rookery. These birds were of migratory habit and might be expected to leave us before the winter set in fully, but in the meantime they were within our reach. These attractions, however, were overridden by the fact that the beach was open to the attack of wind and sea from the north-east ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... was longer and coarser under the shadow of the limes, and upborne on the branches were numerous little sticks which had dropped from the rookery above. Sometimes there was an overthrown nest like a sack of twigs turned out on the turf, such as the hedgers rake together after fagoting. Looking up into the trees on a summer's day not a bird could be seen, till suddenly there was a quick 'jack-jack' above, as a daw started from ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... represented in books, though the drawing is more correct than the colouring. Examine Randolph Caldecott's Sing a Song for Sixpence for a really clever sketch of the four and twenty blackbirds, every one a characteristic likeness, and a different attitude; and look at his rookery in Bracebridge Hall, where, in three sketches he shows some equally ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... up an endless chatter, croaking, or rather barking, just like a number of dogs quarrelling, in all manner of keys, as they bustled in and out of the "rookery" they had established in the arm of the cliff; and Fritz and Eric had been much diverted by their movements, particularly when the feathered colonists came out of the water from their fishing excursions and proceeded ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Rookery building and the Masonic Temple in Chicago, and then was called to various cities where he supervised the erection of imposing piles which have become landmarks. It was while studying the relations of these large buildings to their surroundings that he became interested ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... said that there's a big crow rookery somewhere back in the gloomy old Black Water Swamps; but I never met anybody that had ever set eyes on the same. Every day, winter and summer, that big flock comes out, and scatters to a lot of feeding ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... spruce firs. It was easy to know when the birds had paired, as a couple of rooks could then be often seen perched gravely side by side upon an old nest in the midst of leafless boughs, deliberating about its repair. There were some poplars near a part of the rookery, and when the nests were fully occupied with young the old birds frequently alighted on the very top of an adjacent poplar. The slender brush-like tip of the tree bent with their weight, curving over like a whip, to ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... farmer heard the cawing sound, And sent to all his neighbours round, Begging of them every one To bring a rifle or a gun, If they would come the sport to see Of shooting at the rookery; And try to check the rural pest, Which did the country so infest, And stop the robbery of corn, Which was no longer to ...
— CAW! CAW! - The Chronicle of Crows, A Tale of the Spring-time • RM

... finally came out from beneath the last great rookery, the sisters found themselves in London, the great and busy city of four hundred ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... imputation," entitled "Leah and Rachel; or, The Two Fruitful Sisters," by Mr John Hammond, London, considers the charges that Virginia "is an unhealthy place, a nest of rogues, abandoned women, dissolut and rookery persons; a place of intolerable labour, bad usage and hard diet"; and admits that "at the first settling, and for many years after, it deserved most of these aspersions, nor were they then aspersions but truths. There were jails supplied, ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger

... observed that in a field of cattle, when one or two were mischievous, and persisted long in annoying or tyrannizing over the rest, the herd, to all appearance, consulted, and then, making a united effort, drove the troublers off the ground. The members of a rookery have also been observed to take turns in supplying the needs of a family reduced to orphanhood. All of these are acts of reason, in no respect different from similar acts of men. Moreover, although there is no heritage of accumulated knowledge amongst the lower animals, as there is amongst us, they ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... swiftly after her, and Sofia swung in panic and stumbled up the steps. There were others up above, two to her certain knowledge, possibly many more of Victor's creatures; but if only she could find some sort of refuge in the uppermost fastnesses of the rookery, perhaps ... ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance



Words linked to "Rookery" :   heronry, breeding ground



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